Product Placement R Us!

Rating: 5/10 (21 August 2005)

My mate decided to go the cinema this weekend, and I was coming along whether I liked it or not. He suggested that seeing as I had liked Armageddon (I hadn't, I far preferred Deep Impact - similar themed film that was released at the same time), I'd love this.
It started so promisingly. The world is contaminated. They're the only survivors. And you get out by winning a lottery to the island, the only non contaminated bit left outside. Except you don't, you're a clone, created to generate bits for someone who is rich and needs them and your number is up when they need or want their transplant.
It's not meant to be intellectual and indeed doesn't attempt to be such. It's a no brainer action film, unashamedly so. McGregor leads the show, in style, Johannson is getting better and better in every film she does, by giving a good show with a pretty poor dialogue allocation, whilst Sean Bean is a good bad guy and Buscemi turns in yet another good geek-that's-critical-to-the-plot performance. Michael Clarke Duncan is criminally underused. The actors and actresses are fine. The plot is thin-ish, but fine. The context is definitely fine, original even.
And then it gets ruined (and I do mean RUINED) by the amount of product placement that is ridiculously blatant. It got to the point where both me and my mate where counting the amount that we saw.
So here goes: We counted McGregor wears Puma Shoes, Aquafina is served at numerous intervals, McGregor's other half drives a tasty looking Cadillac, McGregor and Johannson hitch a lift at one point on a very shiny Mack Truck, X-Box floated in there at one point, there's a big Johnny Rockets logo (you can't miss it), MSN is used to look up Johannson's other half, they use Amtrak to get to LA, Johannson uses AMEX to pay for some ice cream, McGregor's other half uses a Nokia phone to make a video call, plus I've seen Jeremy Clarkson on that nice shiny boat that features a lot as well.
It's blatant, and ruins what is otherwise a good 1.5 hr yarn.